Recent blog posts by erhardt

On May 30, 2017,Kathy J. Cramer, professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and author ofThe Politics of Resentment, spoke at the MIT Media Lab. This is a summary of that talk; any errors are mine.

Research Question

Cramer notes that the question on many scholars and citizens minds right now is "Why do people vote against their interests?" Most are implicitly asking, "Why are people getting it wrong?” But she believes that the better question to ask is "How are people understanding their world?"

The motivating question in the research Cramer has done that culminated in her 2016 book is "How does social class identity matter for the way people understand their world?” She tries to listen to people talk in the places where they live and spend their time. This gives her a chance to understand their social identity. So she invites herself into conversations with people who vary across socio-demographic characteristics.

Methods

When she started in 2007, she chose to study a couple dozen communities in Wisconsin that would represent a diverse sample. Before she set out to visit a place, she would contact the local newspaper and the University of Wisconsin extension office nearby to learn where to find groups people who meet up regularly that she might chat with. She found herself in diners, churches, gas stations, and other local haunts.

Cramer had a semi-structured interview protocol to follow but tried to let the conversations go where they would. In the first year of research, she would return to the groups up to three times over the following year, and then at least once a year going forward until the study ended in 2012. When her book came out in 2016 and after the election, she followed up with the groups, sharing her book and findings and asking them about their current opinions.

At MIT's Day of Action, Nathan Freitas of Guardian Project led a workshop on mobile security for activists, focusing on various secure messaging apps available today, touching on their benefits and risks for different kinds of activities and communities.

Common messaging apps (and their secure setting)

Conversations (default, can also interface with other secure XMPP apps like ChatSecure and Zom)

All of these apps transfer messages over the internet via your data plan. SMS messages are never encrypted and can additionally be seen by your telephone company, which is particularly insecure because metadata from phone companies can be acquired without a warrant. Instead, internet-based messaging apps can be secured using "end to end" encryption with their secure settings. This means that messages are encrypted and then conveyed over encrypted connections (HTTPS/TLS) between phones and servers.

It's important to understand what each service knows about its users and what it stores. This may include:

When you are connected to the internet

Your phone number for user identity purposes (thus, they can look up your name at the phone company)

Your network of friends, IF you uploaded your contact book

Because of end to end encryption, these companies generally don't have access to your messages unless you are using them on an insecure setting like green messages on iMessage (actually sent by SMS) or non-secret Facebook Messengers messages. Because of this companies under subpoena can only provide metadata, not the messages themselves.

The SIGCHI Ethics Committee is charged with helping facilitate community conversations—helping social norms emerge from the community. This should help refine ACM’s policies and procedures. The Committee does not make decisions about what is ethical. Bruckman also sits on ACM COPE which works on ACM’s Code of Conduct (which was written before the Web existed).

Bruckman and Feisler start the town hall off by reflecting on how traditional human subjects rules were written for medical research. This is often a poor fit for social science, internet environment, methods that involve stakeholders as full partners, and interventions in public places.

Common open questions in research ethics across computer science communities include how we develop ethical standards that work cross-nationally and cross-disciplinarily. Serious issues involve data privacy and legality with respect to “public” data and platform terms of service, and how to secure truly informed consent. The following are the questions and comments discussed during the town hall.